Review: Girl in the Mirror by Elizabeth Reyes

Reviewed by Joanna

Maggie wakes up in hospital. She can’t speak, feel and this confused nineteen year old can’t remember even her own name. The woman crying at her bedside, apparently her mother, fills some of the blanks, but it’s a while before the hospital psychologist allows her the truth. While out driving with her twin sister and best friend, Maggie was in a terrible car crash. She’s the sole survivor.

Recovery and rehabilitation from the injuries causing her amnesia is one thing, but how do you grieve for people you don’t remember? How do you accept information from a mother whose face you’ve no recollection of ever seeing before? And what do you do when several years later, the gaping hole in you still isn’t filled?

I like a mystery novel every now and again, so long as there’s a strong romantic element, and the premise of this story appealed to me as it pulls on those deep down fears we all have over our identity and our safety. Maggie’s world is turned upside down by the accident, and her amnesia is scary. The flashbacks she gets nearly floor her with their intensity, but they make no sense, making her sense of isolation worse.

Needing to move to accommodate a transfer in her mother’s job, Maggie settles into a new life in a new town, but there’s always something missing beyond the fact that her memory never returns. A pull to something or someone she can’t quite recall. Having been a twin is a huge deal, and not being able to recall the gentler version of her cuts deeply.

Then one day, during a secret trip to her sister’s graveside, she meets Nicolas. Hell yez I like the sound of him. Tall, dark and tatted, riding a motorbike and with the most terrible haunting pain in his green eyes when he sets eyes on our girl.

I’m going to tell you zero more about this story as it weaves and turns and has a big ol’ twist at the end. For the last third I was gripped, and even though I’d worked out one of the big secrets, a few others were welcome Ohhhh moments.

Nicolas and his biker brothers provided some good Honorable Men for me to swoon over, and there was another guy who I loved to hate. He does such an irritating asshole thing, and doesn’t he know he could’ve ruined everything! The romance in this heats up late in the book, and though the heroine and hero get a decent chunk of time together, the story doesn’t initially revolve around creating a relationship. If you’re desperate to know whether there’s a HEA before you buy, read the spoiler (it doesn’t ruin the main plot points).

Yep, it’s HEA and babies and the world is a shiny, happy place. I won’t read books without HEA’s either.

The writing is okay but I felt, as with other work by this author, quite distant from the subject and not embedded in the scene. To some extent, the style helped with Maggie’s confused state as it wasn’t sharp or perfectly clear, but sometimes I wanted that in-the-moment sense of action. Scenes were sometimes told in retrospect and more than once I skimmed blocks of repetitive introspection. This lessened as the pace heated up, and overall it didn’t stop me enjoying the story.